Just me.

Archive for the tag “social networking”

This morning, I received some sad news about a death of a man I knew just about my whole life, but from whom I’d grown distant over the last few years. No need to go into any detail publicly, except to say that I find the situation exceptionally complicated and tragic.

My first instinct, honed over the last 10 or 12 years, is to reach out via my online life. I want to express how I feel. I want to encourage others to make good decisions and always do ‘just so’. I want people to love each other and look out for each other’s interests rather than their own.

But then I remembered a piece I read a couple of years ago in the New York Times. Maureen Dowd interviewed the founders of Twitter, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. One bit stuck with me:

ME: I heard about a woman who tweeted her father’s funeral. Whatever happened to private pain?

EVAN: I have private pain every day.

I suppose we all do. Sometimes we keep it private out of shame. Other times we can’t handle the pressure. Still other times, like in this case, we do it out of respect for other people’s privacy.

Either way, I just need to watch out for the oversharing. But this is okay, it seems to me, because it’s a little more ‘meta’: it’s about the need to refrain from putting too much out there even when we want contact.

Okay, so I’m no Dr. Evil, but I do have this odd desire to share what’s happening in my life and what’s bouncing around in my head with people. Sometimes the ruminations have a focus, other times they just reflect current personal events and whatnot.

Even though I don’t update this blog very often, my Twitter feed does get a lot of activity. So when I do write something here, usually I prefer to make it something more than a quick blurb. And the folks that want to see what’s happening want more than just that; photos, videos, etc. all figure into the mess. In short, I want a lifestream (or the equivalent of my Facebook updates).

A few months ago, I thought FriendFeed might provide the answer, but now I’ve found a service I think I like better: Storytlr. The presentation looks a lot nicer and they have some advanced options like using a CNAME record (so your site looks like it really is your site) as well as backing up your data from other services.

For those interested, I still use Feedburner, so you can still just get the same URL no matter what. Then again, you might get inundated with my Twitter updates…

I really like the new, cleaner Facebook layout. The older layout causes a great deal more confusion and management difficulty. Emphasizing the activity feeds really moves it closer to solving the difficult problem of centralizing my web activities; FriendFeed accomplishes some of this but feels far less polished. Finding various tools seems easier because of this redesign, though occasionally it still hangs up on me. As it opens up more, though, it’s poised to really take over the world, I think. At least mine, anyway.

Flock is a “social browser” based on the Firefox 3 code base with additional support for Web 2.0 baked into it. That is, it has sidebars for social networking sites, detects media streams, comes with support for blogging (this post is being done from inside the Flock tool), and more.

It does the job pretty well, but it feels overly heavy. The UI is really busy and sometimes arcane. I’m not sure what it gains me other than avoiding installing some Firefox add-ons that I’ve already grown to know and love.